ecigs

For those of you most familiar with the modus operandi of the EU institutions, this won’t come as much of a surprise. Back in March 2017, the Commission published the results of a public consultation on whether or not e-cigs should be subject to a tobacco-style excise.

Naturally, the overwhelming answer was no. With the largest group of respondents being individuals. Naturally, being the EU, they weren’t particularly satisfied with such a response and all went quiet. Only for them to produce yet another consultation asking the same questions.

With the recent announcement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb talking about the possibility of curtailing the marketing and selling of flavoured vapour products, it is timely that the Centre for Substance Use Research should have recently published a paper on the topic.

Things have kind of gone to hell and back recently, so I have had zero time at all to put my fingers to key and keep this blog updated. Much has happened which has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. I may revisit some of those points at some point in the near future, but that depends on time; which as I’ve already pointed out, I don’t have a lot of. Who knew married life would be so busy?

In somewhat of a surprising move, the American Cancer Society has quietly updated its position statement on electronic cigarettes. I say quietly because there is no mention of this update on any of the social media channels, nor was there any special press release or blog post on their website.

To borrow from Andrew Allison, once upon a time private property rights were highly valued. As long as it was legal, what consenting adults did was no-one else’s business. With the March of the Puritans, however, there are umpteen state-funded Quangos, sock-puppets and Government busybodies poking their noses in where it is decidedly unwelcome.

Leaving aside the fact that I haven’t posted for a while (almost two months), it isn’t particularly surprising to find that a) the media are at it again, and b) tobacco control researchers are at it again.

We have seen this kind of study before, at around the same time of the year, where some ‘research’ makes some claim about how e-cigarettes are “worse than originally thought”. We’ve recently seen a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the US which largely mirrors the findings from the UK’s Royal College of Physicians; I do plan to go over that at some point – time permitting.

Of course, there’s always more research to be done, nothing is ever 100 percent conclusive, so it is unsurprising to see more DNA research.